his wife. A woman had only to rattle the fireback with the poker to summon help from next door when her waters burst and her labor was starting. The children ("bairns" in the North Country tongue) were born and raised, as the dead were mourned,collecrively. Here is Liza, grieving for her son, killed in the Second World War: Her body performed the familiar tasks, but her mind was lost in a white land. Fields of snow broken only by the footprints of small animals, animals that you never saw, but only heard or felt, pitter-pattering along, somewhere close behind. When she could bear it no longer, she went out and walked up and down the street, head bowed, arms folded across her body. The neighbours let her alone, though they were al- ways aware of her, pausing in their washing of bedroom windows or looking up from the front doorstep as she passed. Then somebody would go to fetch Mrs Dobbin and she would run out and put her arms round Liza and lead her back to the house. "Howay in, love," she'd say. "Look, it's gunna rain." From the outset, Barker demonstrated compassion and psychological insight, and a formidable literary technique. Her plots have elements of the murder mystery or the psychological thriller, with mercu- rial shifts of narrative viewpoint from one character to another and from a charac- ter's interior monologue to godlike omni- science. She explores the consequences of violence, whether between nations or within the deceptive coziness of home. She is by turns bawdy, lyrical, and cine- matic. She is not afraid of the gothic. "I am interested not just in right and wrong but in good and evil," she says. "And in in- nocence and experience-an entirely different thing, but also fascinating." With "Blow Your House Down;' she turned an unblinking eye on a community of work- ing-class women who had resorted to prostitution and become the prey of a killer based on the real-life nineteen-sev- enties murderer known as the Yorkshire Ripper. Even in this Dostoyevskian roman noir of women on the edge-vulnerable on wet night streets, in boarded-up houses, and under railway arches-there are variants of class distinction. In "Union Street," most people were poor, but some were clean and respectable, while others were rough or merely common. " C lass gets in, if you're an English writer," Barker said. "You almost can't avoid it." It hadn't occurred to her, until some readers pointed it out, that "Life Class," the title of her latest novel, might be seen as an allusion to the class system. But certainly she was interested in the Slade School of Fine Art (one of the book's settings, along with the grue- some wards of a field hospital and a lit- tle Belgian town adjacent to the front), partly because in 1914 that famous in- stitution was one of the few places in England where social classes mingled. "You had aristocratic girls like Lady Diana Manners, using it as part of their 'finishing,' and also very poor working- class Jewish boys from the East End, who were trying to do the whole thing on tiny scholarships and weren't getting enough to eat," she said. In Barker's own life, the first cross-fertilizing en- counter with a culture wider than her family's came when she won a place at a local all-girls grammar school. Her grandmother tried to keep up with the books she brought home, until the homework was Latin or algebra and the gulf irreparably widened. Her step- grandfather could sign his name, but he couldn't read. His illiteracy, like his war, was an unmentionable topic. He used to sit in his armchair pretending to read a newspaper. Pat Barker grew up with silent, wounded men. "And with talkative women, spinning stories," she said. "Stories with bits missing." She is a true war baby. "My mother was in the Wrens"-the Women's Royal Naval Service-"and her stories about World W ar Two were always quite intriguing. She used to run home through an air raid, because she knew her mother would be worried. It was a very dangerous thing to do, but I'm afraid that wouldn't occur to my mother. She re- ally adored the war. She was one of those women whose lives were expanded by the experience of it. She was on this huge mixed-service base, and there were lots and lots of young men. One of whom was my father! But her stories stopped short of revealing h . h " W IC one. To the end of her mother's life, Barker never got to the bottom of it. She thinks now that her mother had no idea who he was. "I would try to get her to speak about it, but she would just invent whatever she thought I wanted to hear. What happened was that she had fallen very deeply in love with a marine, who was travelling on a submarine-or a ship, I'm not sure which-that was blown up and sunk. The girls she was in a hut with persuaded her-to pull her out of it-to go out drinking, and she got ab- solutely plastered. There's no doubt that what was in her mind was this man she had really loved, and who was still, to the end of her life, a significant figure. And the man she met that night and had sex with was an insignificant figure, except for the fact that she got lumbered . h " Th . 1 " I ' al WIt me. ere was a SI ence. t s - most like being begotten by a ghost," she added. When her mother died, eight years ago, Barker found a photograph of the marine hidden under the cloth on her mother's dressing table. "I'm sure there were times when to console herself she persuaded herself that I was this man's child. But I definitely wasn't." She has kept the photograph; it would mean nothing to anyone else in the family, but it means something to her. "The man who ought to have been my father." Her pregnant mother had to leave the Wrens and go back to live with her mother and stepfather, and the man with the bayonet wound was hardly eager to share his home with the young woman and her infant daughter. "I was not allowed to cry, as a baby," Barker said. "Not because they were stupidly fond of me, but because he would have raised the roof if he'd had a crying baby in the house. I was actually hidden in a cupboard once. My grandmother told me the story. My grandmother and my mother were so ashamed of this thing. When my step- grandfather's relatives came round-they were posh, you see, several notches up the so- cialladder- I was actually hidden, asleep, put upstairs. Myexis- tence was not mentioned." She was fifteen when her step-grand- father died. "He was a very nice old man, really. He grew to love me. On his deathbed, he called for me continually. Didn't want anybody else. I remember holding his hand. He wanted me to pull him up. He kept saying, 'Pull! Pull!' He'd had a very bad hemorrhage, but THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 17, 2008 43